The Age of Innocence, Page 20

  XX.

  "Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," Archer said; andhis wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumentalBritannia ware of their lodging house breakfast-table.

  In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two peoplewhom the Newland Archers knew; and these two they had sedulouslyavoided, in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not"dignified" to force one's self on the notice of one's acquaintances inforeign countries.

  Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had sounflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advancesof their fellow-travellers with an air of such impenetrable reserve,that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged aword with a "foreigner" other than those employed in hotels andrailway-stations. Their own compatriots--save those previously knownor properly accredited--they treated with an even more pronounceddisdain; so that, unless they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or aMingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken tete-a-tete.But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night atBotzen one of the two English ladies in the room across the passage(whose names, dress and social situation were already intimately knownto Janey) had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottleof liniment. The other lady--the intruder's sister, Mrs. Carfry--hadbeen seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and Mrs. Archer, whonever travelled without a complete family pharmacy, was fortunatelyable to produce the required remedy.

  Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister Miss Harle weretravelling alone they were profoundly grateful to the Archer ladies,who supplied them with ingenious comforts and whose efficient maidhelped to nurse the invalid back to health.

  When the Archers left Botzen they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs.Carfry and Miss Harle again. Nothing, to Mrs. Archer's mind, wouldhave been more "undignified" than to force one's self on the notice ofa "foreigner" to whom one had happened to render an accidental service.But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown,and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselveslinked by an eternal gratitude to the "delightful Americans" who hadbeen so kind at Botzen. With touching fidelity they seized everychance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of theircontinental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in findingout when they were to pass through London on their way to or from theStates. The intimacy became indissoluble, and Mrs. Archer and Janey,whenever they alighted at Brown's Hotel, found themselves awaited bytwo affectionate friends who, like themselves, cultivated ferns inWardian cases, made macrame lace, read the memoirs of the BaronessBunsen and had views about the occupants of the leading London pulpits.As Mrs. Archer said, it made "another thing of London" to know Mrs.Carfry and Miss Harle; and by the time that Newland became engaged thetie between the families was so firmly established that it was thought"only right" to send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies,who sent, in return, a pretty bouquet of pressed Alpine flowers underglass. And on the dock, when Newland and his wife sailed for England,Mrs. Archer's last word had been: "You must take May to see Mrs.Carfry."

  Newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying this injunction; butMrs. Carfry, with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent theman invitation to dine; and it was over this invitation that May Archerwas wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins.

  "It's all very well for you, Newland; you KNOW them. But I shall feelso shy among a lot of people I've never met. And what shall I wear?"

  Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her. She lookedhandsomer and more Diana-like than ever. The moist English air seemedto have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and softened the slighthardness of her virginal features; or else it was simply the inner glowof happiness, shining through like a light under ice.

  "Wear, dearest? I thought a trunkful of things had come from Parislast week."

  "Yes, of course. I meant to say that I shan't know WHICH to wear."She pouted a little. "I've never dined out in London; and I don't wantto be ridiculous."

  He tried to enter into her perplexity. "But don't Englishwomen dressjust like everybody else in the evening?"

  "Newland! How can you ask such funny questions? When they go to thetheatre in old ball-dresses and bare heads."

  "Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate Mrs.Carfry and Miss Harle won't. They'll wear caps like my mother's--andshawls; very soft shawls."

  "Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?"

  "Not as well as you, dear," he rejoined, wondering what had suddenlydeveloped in her Janey's morbid interest in clothes.

  She pushed back her chair with a sigh. "That's dear of you, Newland;but it doesn't help me much."

  He had an inspiration. "Why not wear your wedding-dress? That can'tbe wrong, can it?"

  "Oh, dearest! If I only had it here! But it's gone to Paris to bemade over for next winter, and Worth hasn't sent it back."

  "Oh, well--" said Archer, getting up. "Look here--the fog's lifting.If we made a dash for the National Gallery we might manage to catch aglimpse of the pictures."

  The Newland Archers were on their way home, after a three months'wedding-tour which May, in writing to her girl friends, vaguelysummarised as "blissful."

  They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection, Archer had notbeen able to picture his wife in that particular setting. Her owninclination (after a month with the Paris dressmakers) was formountaineering in July and swimming in August. This plan theypunctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and Grindelwald, andAugust at a little place called Etretat, on the Normandy coast, whichsome one had recommended as quaint and quiet. Once or twice, in themountains, Archer had pointed southward and said: "There's Italy"; andMay, her feet in a gentian-bed, had smiled cheerfully, and replied:"It would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn't have tobe in New York."

  But in reality travelling interested her even less than he hadexpected. She regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely anenlarged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her handat the fascinating new game of lawn tennis; and when they finally gotback to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he orderedHIS clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which shelooked forward to sailing.

  In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops; andshe found the theatres less exciting than the Paris cafes chantantswhere, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees, shehad had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurantterrace on an audience of "cocottes," and having her husband interpretto her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.

  Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. Itwas less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly asall his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practicethe theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmestnotion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered thatMay's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would beto lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. Her innate dignitywould always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day mighteven come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take italtogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. Butwith a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as herssuch a crisis could be brought about only by something visiblyoutrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for himmade that unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always beloyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice ofthe same virtues.

  All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind. If hersimplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafedand rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, wereon the same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelary divinity
ofall his old traditions and reverences.

  Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel,though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw atonce how they would fall into place in their proper setting. He had nofear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual lifewould go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and withinit there would be nothing small and stifling--coming back to his wifewould never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open.And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives wouldbe filled.

  All these things went through his mind during their long slow drivefrom Mayfair to South Kensington, where Mrs. Carfry and her sisterlived. Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends'hospitality: in conformity with the family tradition he had alwaystravelled as a sight-seer and looker-on, affecting a haughtyunconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings. Once only, justafter Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band ofqueer Europeanised Americans, dancing all night with titled ladies inpalaces, and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of thefashionable club; but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest funin the world, as unreal as a carnival. These queer cosmopolitan women,deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the needof retailing to every one they met, and the magnificent young officersand elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of theirconfidences, were too different from the people Archer had grown upamong, too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics,to detain his imagination long. To introduce his wife into such asociety was out of the question; and in the course of his travels noother had shown any marked eagerness for his company.

  Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke ofSt. Austrey, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognising him, hadsaid: "Look me up, won't you?"--but no proper-spirited American wouldhave considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting waswithout a sequel. They had even managed to avoid May's English aunt,the banker's wife, who was still in Yorkshire; in fact, they hadpurposely postponed going to London till the autumn in order that theirarrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish tothese unknown relatives.

  "Probably there'll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry's--London's a desert atthis season, and you've made yourself much too beautiful," Archer saidto May, who sat at his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in hersky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose herto the London grime.

  "I don't want them to think that we dress like savages," she replied,with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struckagain by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly Americanwomen for the social advantages of dress.

  "It's their armour," he thought, "their defence against the unknown,and their defiance of it." And he understood for the first time theearnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in herhair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting andordering her extensive wardrobe.

  He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry's to be a smallone. Besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the longchilly drawing-room, only another shawled lady, a genial Vicar who washer husband, a silent lad whom Mrs. Carfry named as her nephew, and asmall dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor,pronouncing a French name as she did so.

  Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer floated like aswan with the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, morevoluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her; and heperceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of anextreme and infantile shyness.

  "What on earth will they expect me to talk about?" her helpless eyesimplored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition wascalling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms. But beauty, evenwhen distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart; andthe Vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May theirdesire to put her at her ease.

  In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishingaffair. Archer noticed that his wife's way of showing herself at herease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in herreferences, so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement toadmiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee. The Vicar soonabandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent andaccomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her untilthe ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to thedrawing-room.

  The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to ameeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packedoff to bed. But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine,and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since hislast symposium with Ned Winsett. The Carfry nephew, it turned out, hadbeen threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrow forSwitzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of LakeLeman. Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Riviere, whohad brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till hewent up to Oxford the following spring; and M. Riviere added withsimplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.

  It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long withoutone, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts. He was a manof about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have calledhim common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intenseexpressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in hisanimation.

  His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, andit had been intended that the son should follow the same career; but aninsatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism,then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at length--afterother experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--intotutoring English youths in Switzerland. Before that, however, he hadlived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt grenier, been advised byMaupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer adazzling honour!), and had often talked with Merimee in his mother'shouse. He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious(having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it wasapparent that his literary ambitions had failed. His situation, infact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than NedWinsett's; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one wholoved ideas need hunger mentally. As it was precisely of that lovethat poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort ofvicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared sorichly in his poverty.

  "You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one'sintellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation,one's critical independence? It was because of that that I abandonedjournalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and privatesecretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but onepreserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant asoi. And when one hears good talk one can join in it withoutcompromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answerit inwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there?The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. And so I have neverregretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different formsof the same self-abdication." He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as helit another cigarette. "Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look lifein the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? But, afterall, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that togrow old as a private tutor--or a 'private' anything--is almost aschilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest.Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge. Do yousuppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America--inNew York?"

  Archer looked at him with startled eyes. New York, for a young man whohad frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert, and who thought the life ofideas the only one worth living! He continued to stare at M. Riviereperp
lexedly, wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities andadvantages would be the surest hindrance to success.

  "New York--New York--but must it be especially New York?" he stammered,utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city couldoffer to a young man to whom good conversation appeared to be the onlynecessity.

  A sudden flush rose under M. Riviere's sallow skin. "I--I thought ityour metropolis: is not the intellectual life more active there?" herejoined; then, as if fearing to give his hearer the impression ofhaving asked a favour, he went on hastily: "One throws out randomsuggestions--more to one's self than to others. In reality, I see noimmediate prospect--" and rising from his seat he added, without atrace of constraint: "But Mrs. Carfry will think that I ought to betaking you upstairs."

  During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode. Hishour with M. Riviere had put new air into his lungs, and his firstimpulse had been to invite him to dine the next day; but he wasbeginning to understand why married men did not always immediatelyyield to their first impulses.

  "That young tutor is an interesting fellow: we had some awfully goodtalk after dinner about books and things," he threw out tentatively inthe hansom.

  May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he hadread so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him thekey to them.

  "The little Frenchman? Wasn't he dreadfully common?" she questionedcoldly; and he guessed that she nursed a secret disappointment athaving been invited out in London to meet a clergyman and a Frenchtutor. The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentimentordinarily defined as snobbishness, but by old New York's sense of whatwas due to it when it risked its dignity in foreign lands. If May'sparents had entertained the Carfrys in Fifth Avenue they would haveoffered them something more substantial than a parson and aschoolmaster.

  But Archer was on edge, and took her up.

  "Common--common WHERE?" he queried; and she returned with unusualreadiness: "Why, I should say anywhere but in his school-room. Thosepeople are always awkward in society. But then," she addeddisarmingly, "I suppose I shouldn't have known if he was clever."

  Archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her useof the word "common"; but he was beginning to fear his tendency todwell on the things he disliked in her. After all, her point of viewhad always been the same. It was that of all the people he had grownup among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible.Until a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked atlife differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among thenice.

  "Ah--then I won't ask him to dine!" he concluded with a laugh; and Mayechoed, bewildered: "Goodness--ask the Carfrys' tutor?"

  "Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys, if you prefer I shouldn't.But I did rather want another talk with him. He's looking for a job inNew York."

  Her surprise increased with her indifference: he almost fancied thatshe suspected him of being tainted with "foreignness."

  "A job in New York? What sort of a job? People don't have Frenchtutors: what does he want to do?"

  "Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand," her husbandretorted perversely; and she broke into an appreciative laugh. "Oh,Newland, how funny! Isn't that FRENCH?"

  On the whole, he was glad to have the matter settled for him by herrefusing to take seriously his wish to invite M. Riviere. Anotherafter-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question ofNew York; and the more Archer considered it the less he was able to fitM. Riviere into any conceivable picture of New York as he knew it.

  He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future manyproblems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid thehansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refugein the comforting platitude that the first six months were always themost difficult in marriage. "After that I suppose we shall have prettynearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but theworst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the veryangles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.